Details: By Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com

How Sleep Deprivation Makes You Believe Lies, Buy Crap, and Follow Orders

by Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com

Once upon a time, people actually got a decent night’s sleep. They didn’t have blue light beaming into their eyeballs at midnight, and their workdays didn’t extend into the late hours via emails and text messages. But today, modern society has turned sleep into an inconvenience—something to be minimized rather than prioritized.

We’ve all heard the mantra: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” But what if lack of sleep is speeding up that timeline? Worse, what if it’s making you less capable of functioning in the world—less rational, more anxious, more depressed?

What Happens in Your Brain?

Here’s a crash course in why sleep isn’t optional: When you sleep, your brain performs maintenance. Think of it like an overnight cleaning crew scrubbing out toxins, consolidating memories, and repairing cognitive functions. Without sleep, that cleanup doesn’t happen, and the mental mess just keeps piling up.

When you don’t get enough rest, your amygdala—the brain’s fear center—goes into overdrive. That means heightened stress, overreactions, and a general sense of unease. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex—the part responsible for rational thought and impulse control—gets weaker. In other words, sleep deprivation literally makes you more reactive and less logical. Sound familiar?

It’s no coincidence that the rise of anxiety and depression correlates with declining sleep quality. Studies show that people who consistently get fewer than six hours of sleep a night are far more likely to experience mood disorders. Why? Because sleep is essential for emotional regulation.

Think of your emotions like a crowded subway system. When you sleep well, everything moves smoothly. When you’re sleep-deprived, it’s like rush hour chaos—trains get stuck, passengers get irritable, and the whole system is a mess. That’s your brain without rest.

Chronic sleep deprivation doesn’t just make you cranky. It actively increases the risk of developing clinical depression and anxiety disorders. In fact, sleep deprivation is such a powerful trigger for mental distress that it’s been used as a form of torture. Let that sink in.

How Sleep Deprivation Warps Reality

Ever notice how everything seems worse at 2 AM? That’s not just in your head—it’s a documented phenomenon. When you’re sleep-deprived, your brain shifts into survival mode, prioritizing fear and emotion over logic and reasoning. And when you combine exhaustion with a 24/7 stream of social media doom-scrolling, misinformation, and political propaganda, you get a perfect storm of paranoia, impulsive decision-making, and belief in absolute nonsense.

Lack of sleep doesn’t just make you tired—it makes you worse at life. When you’re running on fumes, your patience wears thin, your emotions spiral out of control, and your ability to make good decisions takes a nosedive. Everything that would normally be a minor inconvenience suddenly feels like an insurmountable crisis, and before you know it, you’re making choices you’ll regret.

At work, exhaustion turns even the best employees into liabilities. A tired brain struggles with focus, leading to careless mistakes, missed deadlines, and knee-jerk reactions instead of thoughtful problem-solving. Studies have shown that consistently getting less than six hours of sleep can impair cognitive function to the same degree as being legally intoxicated. That means your boss, proudly running on three hours of sleep, might as well be making decisions after a couple of shots of whiskey.

At home, sleep deprivation makes parenting an uphill battle. Fatigue strips away patience, making it harder to handle the everyday chaos that comes with raising children. Small frustrations, like a spilled drink or a messy room, feel monumental when you’re running on empty. Ever snapped at a toddler over something trivial, only to feel guilty later? That’s not bad parenting—that’s an exhausted brain losing its ability to regulate emotions.

And in relationships, the damage can be just as severe. Sleep-deprived couples are more likely to bicker over meaningless issues, misinterpret neutral comments as criticism, and hold onto resentment longer than they should. When exhaustion clouds judgment, a simple misunderstanding can escalate into a full-blown argument. Your brain, in its foggy, overtired state, sees threats where none exist, turning minor annoyances into relationship landmines.

In every aspect of life—at work, at home, in love—sleep deprivation makes everything harder. It doesn’t just leave you groggy; it rewires your brain to function in survival mode, where logic takes a backseat and emotional volatility runs the show.

World Leaders and Catastrophic Decisions

History is riddled with disasters that could have been avoided if the people in charge had simply gotten a good night’s sleep. Some of the worst political and military blunders in history can be traced back to exhausted leaders making reckless decisions—decisions that cost lives, destroyed empires, and reshaped the world in ways that could have been prevented.

Take the Chernobyl disaster and the Challenger explosion, two of the most infamous technological catastrophes of the 20th century. At Chernobyl, a crucial reactor test was pushed to the night shift, when tired, underqualified workers were in charge. Mistakes were made, warning signs were ignored, and before anyone fully grasped what was happening, an explosion tore through the nuclear facility, spreading radioactive fallout across Europe.

The Challenger disaster followed a similar script—NASA engineers had explicitly warned that launching the shuttle in cold weather was a terrible idea. But their concerns were dismissed by sleep-deprived executives who prioritized schedules over safety. The result? A catastrophic failure that killed seven astronauts and shattered confidence in space travel for years.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s march to Russia in 1812 was another case of hubris mixed with exhaustion. Napoleon was not just an overconfident strategist; he was also notoriously sleep-deprived. Despite his advisors warning him that a deep march into Russian winter without proper supplies was suicidal, he pressed forward. His army, once the most formidable in Europe, was reduced to a starving, frostbitten shell of itself. What should have been a tactical retreat became a humiliating collapse, marking the beginning of his downfall.

Then there’s Adolf Hitler in World War II, a textbook example of how extreme sleep deprivation fuels paranoia and delusion. By the end of the war, Hitler was reportedly surviving on only a few hours of sleep, fueled by a dangerous cocktail of stimulants. His decision-making became erratic, his paranoia intensified, and his refusal to allow strategic retreats cost Germany the war. Instead of listening to his well-rested generals, he insisted on holding ground at all costs, leading to unnecessary destruction and loss of life.

And the pattern hasn’t changed. Even in modern politics, we see leaders who take pride in their grueling schedules, working through the night as if exhaustion is a badge of honor. But sleep deprivation doesn’t make anyone sharper—it makes them reactive, impulsive, and emotionally volatile. And when the fate of nations rests on the decisions of a sleep-deprived leader, the consequences can be catastrophic. One bad call, made in the haze of exhaustion, can send economies spiraling, ignite conflicts, or push humanity closer to disaster.

I wonder if Donald Trump ever sleeps. He boasts about running on just four or five hours a night, and it shows. Chronic sleep deprivation wrecks judgment, impulse control, and long-term planning—exactly the traits behind his trail of bankrupt casinos, failed businesses, and chaotic presidency. From fraudulent universities to erratic tariffs and reckless foreign policy, his history is a masterclass in impulsive, short-sighted decision-making. Maybe the real question isn’t whether he sleeps, but whether his lifelong pattern of failure is a symptom of it. Somebody take away his coffee and cell phone before he blows up the world.

Doom-Scrolling and the Rise of Irrational Beliefs

If you’ve ever found yourself glued to your phone at 1 AM, scrolling endlessly through a doom-laden social media feed, convinced that the world is spiraling into chaos and that nothing makes sense anymore, you’re not alone. Late at night, when exhaustion takes hold, the combination of sleep deprivation and misinformation becomes a dangerous mix—one that bad actors online know exactly how to exploit.

Social media thrives on outrage, and the platforms you rely on for information are built to push the most emotionally charged content to the top of your feed. Fear, anger, and shock drive engagement, which means that when you’re exhausted and your mental filters are down, you become more vulnerable to manipulation. Your tired brain struggles to separate real threats from exaggerated panic, making it far easier to believe and spread misinformation. That’s why fake news travels fastest in the dead of night—when rational thought is at its weakest.

It’s no coincidence that some of the most devoted conspiracy theorists tend to post their theories at 3 AM. Sleep deprivation fuels paranoia, making people more likely to see patterns that don’t actually exist. Studies have shown that when the brain is exhausted, it becomes more prone to overinterpreting coincidences, piecing together unrelated events into grand, imaginary plots. In this fog of exhaustion, a simple algorithmic glitch on a website suddenly becomes evidence of government interference, and an offhand celebrity comment is twisted into proof of an elaborate secret society.

Adding to the problem is the dopamine loop engineered into social media itself. Each scroll, like, and notification is a tiny hit of pleasure designed to keep you engaged, ensuring that you don’t put your phone down. But as the night drags on, the content shifts—what starts as a casual browse turns into an emotional rollercoaster of fear, conspiracy, and manufactured crises. And because a sleep-deprived brain is terrible at filtering out nonsense, much of this noise starts to feel real.

This susceptibility to bad decisions isn’t just limited to social media. There’s a reason why late-night television is packed with infomercials for overpriced health gimmicks, miracle weight-loss pills, and get-rich-quick schemes. Sleep deprivation makes people more impulsive and less skeptical, priming them to buy into magical thinking. When you’re running on empty, your critical reasoning weakens, and suddenly, that “one simple trick” to erase wrinkles or make thousands of dollars from home doesn’t seem so absurd. Marketers know this—which is exactly why those ads air when people are too tired to resist.

At its core, sleep deprivation is an open invitation for manipulation. Whether it’s a political disinformation campaign, a social media algorithm feeding you manufactured outrage, or a late-night scam preying on your impulsivity, the goal is the same: to exploit your exhausted mind when it’s least capable of rational thought.

The Ultimate Distraction

A tired population is an easier population to control. When people are sleep-deprived, they don’t have the mental energy to think critically, question authority, or push back against systems designed to exploit them. And the ones in power—governments, corporations, media conglomerates—know this all too well. Keeping the public exhausted is not just an unfortunate side effect of modern life; it’s a strategy.

An overworked, sleep-deprived workforce is too drained to revolt. If you’re barely scraping by, struggling to keep up with bills, and running on fumes just to survive, you’re not going to have the time or energy to organize against corporate greed or political corruption. Instead of questioning why wages remain stagnant while executive bonuses soar, you’re just trying to get through another day. A society that never sleeps is a society too exhausted to fight back.

And when people are tired, misinformation spreads like wildfire. Exhausted minds don’t analyze; they accept. Instead of taking the time to fact-check, people default to whatever fits their pre-existing biases, making disinformation campaigns frighteningly effective. Late at night, when critical thinking is at its weakest, people are most susceptible to propaganda, conspiracy theories, and outright lies. When someone is well-rested, they might scrutinize a viral claim or investigate a questionable source. But when they’re exhausted? They’ll take it at face value and pass it along.

Even political scandals are carefully timed to take advantage of this weakness. Ever notice how major policy changes and controversial news often break late at night or over holiday weekends? That’s not a coincidence. Governments know that a sleep-deprived public won’t take the time to sift through the fine print of new legislation or notice when their rights are quietly being stripped away. When exhaustion sets in, people don’t ask questions. They comply.

A society that never stops moving, that never prioritizes rest, is a society that’s easier to manipulate. And in a world where those in power thrive on keeping people too tired to resist, reclaiming your sleep might just be one of the most radical acts of all.

Reclaim Your Sleep, Reclaim Your Mind

It’s no coincidence that some of the most successful social movements, revolutions, and cultural renaissances happened when people were well-rested and thinking clearly. If you want to resist manipulation, make better decisions, and actually function as a rational human being, start by prioritizing sleep.

Because the more exhausted you are, the easier you are to control. And that’s exactly what the people in power want.

So tonight, do something radical: Put down your phone, turn off the news, and get a full night’s sleep. It might just be the most rebellious act you can commit in a world that thrives on keeping you too tired to fight back.

About the Author

Robert Jennings is the co-publisher of InnerSelf.com, a platform dedicated to empowering individuals and fostering a more connected, equitable world. A veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army, Robert draws on his diverse life experiences, from working in real estate and construction to building InnerSelf with his wife, Marie T. Russell, to bring a practical, grounded perspective to life’s challenges. Founded in 1996, InnerSelf.com shares insights to help people make informed, meaningful choices for themselves and the planet. More than 30 years later, InnerSelf continues to inspire clarity and empowerment.

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This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License. Attribute the author Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com. Link back to the article This article originally appeared on InnerSelf.com

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Article Recap

Sleep is one of the most underrated tools for mental health. Poor sleep contributes to anxiety, depression, irrational thinking, and even cognitive decline. Without rest, your brain struggles to regulate emotions and make rational decisions. By prioritizing sleep, you can improve your mental well-being, emotional stability, and overall quality of life. It’s time to stop treating sleep like an inconvenience and start recognizing it as the foundation of a healthy mind.

#SleepHealth #MentalWellness #AnxietyHelp #CognitiveFunction #HealthySleep